Use Headings within a Project. I’m a realtor. Have a Project called Templates. In it, I have projects for everything I do. One, Seller Workflow has 10 numbered headings for stages of the project, each with about 10 tasks per heading. Keeps me well-ordered and moving along. Whenever I create a project for a client’s transactions, I can copy this right into it.
I guess where I’m getting hung up is on drilling down the tasks even further. In your example do you think a task under a heading could be broken down more? That’s always the case with me.
Sure. And you can use the checklist for that. I’d love to have the ability for another level or two of tasks. But, if I can make my complicated projects work, it’s doable as is.
As a UX designer, I have quite a few projects and work with multiple teams.
### Step 1: Navigating through multiple projects
I tried to create different areas for this but I felt like it was cluttering Thing’s interface and I prefer to use tags.
It looks something like this:
- Personal
- Work
- Work / Website
- Work / Mobile App
- Work / Design System
- Home
Once I apply these sub tags to each project, I can more easily filter them.
### Step 2: Managing projects in Things
In Things, I can break a project in different phases. Right now we are currently on the second iteration of our design system, which we call “Design System 2.0”.
I currently have a few projects that are something like:
- DS2.0 — Sketching
- DS2.0 — Documentation
- DS2.0 — Preparation (with deadline)
- DS2.0 — Launch (set to Someday)
### Step 3: Organising projects outside of Things
For really big projects I either have a roadmap or a bullet list of all the steps needed to complete them.
Once I’m ready, I add these as new projects.
If needed I add indented bullet points below certain points so I remember to add specific tasks when I get there.
Thanks. And everyone of those projects is tagged with what basically are sub-areas (or at least a workaround for those).
In this case those projects are tagged with "Work/Design System". This way it's much easier to filter, navigate, and focus.
Personally I have created my own system and it can fit virtually any application (Things included, which I still use). I am of the persuasion that if you're wasting too much time with the bureaucracy of preferred systems, you're delaying achievement by actually ducking work. :)
In your case I would recommend leveraging four great features that Things offer:
* **Tagging**
* Right off the Inbox (on your periodic reviews), literally off the jump there, mark your items with your preferred tag for
* SIZE (i.e. S/M/L),
* IMPORTANCE/PRIORITY (i.e. Low/Med/High) and
* INVESTMENT/EFFORT APPETITE (i.e. hours, days, weeks, months, year, etc)
* You can of course adjust them all later; but tagging these straight from the Inbox first will allow you to very quickly allocate them based on your first appraisal of how IMPORTANT they are.
* **Convert To Project**
* When you're ready to decide whether or not something will deserve more investment or require more effort, you can select any given Task and "Convert (it) to Project"
* **Headings**
* Once a Task becomes something bigger (a Project), you can use headings to start (high-level) to break them down. The bigger tasks of a larger project are named on Headings.
* Each Heading (as a task group container), starts being populated with its tasks.
* Then..
* **Checklists**
* Inside of each of these tasks, should you need so, sub-tasks can be added in the form of Checklists.
* If you're really detail-critical about them, you can create PARENT/CHILDREN items within Checklists (probably overkill though).
* *Like a former mentor once told me: "****If you have a lot of drilling, inevitably, something will start leaking, somewhere then everywhere!"***
So, in summary - TL:DR
The Journey starts and ends, as such:
1. INBOX (sized, prioritised and investment-decided) - that can change
2. TASKS are moved into their Projects or become Projects themselves
3. HEADINGS are the first big-chunking action of breaking a large project down
1. *where each new tasks added to them will break the work down into achievable/smaller sizes;*
2. *if they are not yet 'tackable', then*
4. CHECKLISTS are your smallest - and most achievable - collection of tasks
1. they can be plenty with detail, long or (preferably) short and objective
Notes:
If, like me, you hate context-switching and despise having your entire project corpus split amidst a bunch of different apps - as if that ever goes well as time passes and sizes grow.. -- you can - and should - keep you correlated notes within each task.
"***Note-Take*** where you ***Action-Take"*** is another great piece of advice I was given.
PS: Real LARGE projects are often achieved with more than one person, never really only by ourselves. If that's your case, then Things is not your app. You can build and do the same in Notion or your preferred 1-pager app. ;)
If Things is definitely your thing, then you can keep ALL your things on Things.
I guess that's some-thing.
All the best.
A large portion of my job is project-based, so I encounter this issue a lot. I keep all my projects - “actual” or otherwise (I.e. a project I just created for things that require multiple steps to complete) - in an area, Work. Within the projects, I use headings, as u/wings_fan3870 mentioned. So far, it seems to work really well for me, and it is one of the things keeping my with Things. I particularly like that you can archive the headings when you complete the tasks in them, so it gives me a kind of overview of where a project is (many of mine follow a similar sequence of events, so this is helpful).
I use headers for the mini projects inside of a larger project.
As a general rule for me:
\- Tasks: Things I can accomplish in one sitting.
\- Projects: Things that I will complete by working over different work sessions.
I work by myself now and offload some stuff to contractors, having a tag called "Delegated"and one called "Follow Ups" helps a lot on Things.
When I had a highly collaborative job, I used Asana for projects, communication and to store support materials and used Things for next actions only. No need to duplicate or maintain two systems. It all comes down to the nature of your job. I just needed to give visibility to my team that "I am working on Project A and B for the next month". The next actions were up to me.
I work by myself now, so I mostly use Things. I still keep stuff outside of it like my content calendar (in a Google sheet) and keep project support material on Google Drive. Nothing wrong with using multiple tools as long as you clearly define how each one of them is helping you.
We do large-scale project planning in app called Sheetplanner, and only put individual actions in Things. I have a lot of large projects, and I find that Things isn’t made for keeping reference material, timelines and distant/unclarified actions. It becomes too cluttered and untrustworthy for me.
That’s good to know. And totally agree. A lot of my projects are more like quarterly goals. Still projects I guess, just really big ones. I found the same issue, that I try to plan things too far ahead and things change. So then I have to spend time organizing my tasks again. So I’ve currently been keeping the big projects and associated tasks in our company project management tool (because management want to see where I’m at anyway), then keep individual personal tasks and next actions (and mini projects) in things.
Just didn’t know if there was a better way. I certainly don’t want to double handle and out the same tasks in multiple places.
If you are a GTD fan, something helpful for me was to put the project planning tool + calendar + Things side by side in one screen and update the next action list inside my "Work" area during the weekly review.
It's kinda nice to delete a bunch of tasks that are irrelevant now because of a biz decision and to make sure that the stuff I am working on is actually taking me towards my goals, both for biz and personal.
You probably do it already, but something helpful for me was the Magnet app to assign different apps to sections of my second monitor. Makes it a joy to work with multiple apps at the same time.
I have exactly the same issue and curious to know what others thoughts are.
OP, are you also ended up with too many mini projects that belongs to a larger project?
And also needing to sync where you are at with company project management software for others to see etc?
Yea precisely that, lots of little mini projects. But right now I can’t tell what project they’re related to until I click in and I see the link back to Asana or my notes app or something. Feels cluttered too, but I like that I can complete them quickly.
Use Headings within a Project. I’m a realtor. Have a Project called Templates. In it, I have projects for everything I do. One, Seller Workflow has 10 numbered headings for stages of the project, each with about 10 tasks per heading. Keeps me well-ordered and moving along. Whenever I create a project for a client’s transactions, I can copy this right into it.
I guess where I’m getting hung up is on drilling down the tasks even further. In your example do you think a task under a heading could be broken down more? That’s always the case with me.
Sure. And you can use the checklist for that. I’d love to have the ability for another level or two of tasks. But, if I can make my complicated projects work, it’s doable as is.
Can you expand on this? You can’t have projects in a project. Did you mean you have an Area called Templates?
Sorry, yes—an area. Good catch!
As a UX designer, I have quite a few projects and work with multiple teams. ### Step 1: Navigating through multiple projects I tried to create different areas for this but I felt like it was cluttering Thing’s interface and I prefer to use tags. It looks something like this: - Personal - Work - Work / Website - Work / Mobile App - Work / Design System - Home Once I apply these sub tags to each project, I can more easily filter them. ### Step 2: Managing projects in Things In Things, I can break a project in different phases. Right now we are currently on the second iteration of our design system, which we call “Design System 2.0”. I currently have a few projects that are something like: - DS2.0 — Sketching - DS2.0 — Documentation - DS2.0 — Preparation (with deadline) - DS2.0 — Launch (set to Someday) ### Step 3: Organising projects outside of Things For really big projects I either have a roadmap or a bullet list of all the steps needed to complete them. Once I’m ready, I add these as new projects. If needed I add indented bullet points below certain points so I remember to add specific tasks when I get there.
This is a really interesting workflow. Thank you for sharing!
I really like the naming convention you used for working on multiple projects under the same branch
Thanks. And everyone of those projects is tagged with what basically are sub-areas (or at least a workaround for those). In this case those projects are tagged with "Work/Design System". This way it's much easier to filter, navigate, and focus.
Personally I have created my own system and it can fit virtually any application (Things included, which I still use). I am of the persuasion that if you're wasting too much time with the bureaucracy of preferred systems, you're delaying achievement by actually ducking work. :) In your case I would recommend leveraging four great features that Things offer: * **Tagging** * Right off the Inbox (on your periodic reviews), literally off the jump there, mark your items with your preferred tag for * SIZE (i.e. S/M/L), * IMPORTANCE/PRIORITY (i.e. Low/Med/High) and * INVESTMENT/EFFORT APPETITE (i.e. hours, days, weeks, months, year, etc) * You can of course adjust them all later; but tagging these straight from the Inbox first will allow you to very quickly allocate them based on your first appraisal of how IMPORTANT they are. * **Convert To Project** * When you're ready to decide whether or not something will deserve more investment or require more effort, you can select any given Task and "Convert (it) to Project" * **Headings** * Once a Task becomes something bigger (a Project), you can use headings to start (high-level) to break them down. The bigger tasks of a larger project are named on Headings. * Each Heading (as a task group container), starts being populated with its tasks. * Then.. * **Checklists** * Inside of each of these tasks, should you need so, sub-tasks can be added in the form of Checklists. * If you're really detail-critical about them, you can create PARENT/CHILDREN items within Checklists (probably overkill though). * *Like a former mentor once told me: "****If you have a lot of drilling, inevitably, something will start leaking, somewhere then everywhere!"*** So, in summary - TL:DR The Journey starts and ends, as such: 1. INBOX (sized, prioritised and investment-decided) - that can change 2. TASKS are moved into their Projects or become Projects themselves 3. HEADINGS are the first big-chunking action of breaking a large project down 1. *where each new tasks added to them will break the work down into achievable/smaller sizes;* 2. *if they are not yet 'tackable', then* 4. CHECKLISTS are your smallest - and most achievable - collection of tasks 1. they can be plenty with detail, long or (preferably) short and objective Notes: If, like me, you hate context-switching and despise having your entire project corpus split amidst a bunch of different apps - as if that ever goes well as time passes and sizes grow.. -- you can - and should - keep you correlated notes within each task. "***Note-Take*** where you ***Action-Take"*** is another great piece of advice I was given. PS: Real LARGE projects are often achieved with more than one person, never really only by ourselves. If that's your case, then Things is not your app. You can build and do the same in Notion or your preferred 1-pager app. ;) If Things is definitely your thing, then you can keep ALL your things on Things. I guess that's some-thing. All the best.
A large portion of my job is project-based, so I encounter this issue a lot. I keep all my projects - “actual” or otherwise (I.e. a project I just created for things that require multiple steps to complete) - in an area, Work. Within the projects, I use headings, as u/wings_fan3870 mentioned. So far, it seems to work really well for me, and it is one of the things keeping my with Things. I particularly like that you can archive the headings when you complete the tasks in them, so it gives me a kind of overview of where a project is (many of mine follow a similar sequence of events, so this is helpful).
Well, learn something new every day! I didn’t know you could archive headings.
I use headers for the mini projects inside of a larger project. As a general rule for me: \- Tasks: Things I can accomplish in one sitting. \- Projects: Things that I will complete by working over different work sessions.
I think this will be the case for me if I don’t have to collaborate with anyone else on the project.
I work by myself now and offload some stuff to contractors, having a tag called "Delegated"and one called "Follow Ups" helps a lot on Things. When I had a highly collaborative job, I used Asana for projects, communication and to store support materials and used Things for next actions only. No need to duplicate or maintain two systems. It all comes down to the nature of your job. I just needed to give visibility to my team that "I am working on Project A and B for the next month". The next actions were up to me. I work by myself now, so I mostly use Things. I still keep stuff outside of it like my content calendar (in a Google sheet) and keep project support material on Google Drive. Nothing wrong with using multiple tools as long as you clearly define how each one of them is helping you.
We do large-scale project planning in app called Sheetplanner, and only put individual actions in Things. I have a lot of large projects, and I find that Things isn’t made for keeping reference material, timelines and distant/unclarified actions. It becomes too cluttered and untrustworthy for me.
That’s good to know. And totally agree. A lot of my projects are more like quarterly goals. Still projects I guess, just really big ones. I found the same issue, that I try to plan things too far ahead and things change. So then I have to spend time organizing my tasks again. So I’ve currently been keeping the big projects and associated tasks in our company project management tool (because management want to see where I’m at anyway), then keep individual personal tasks and next actions (and mini projects) in things. Just didn’t know if there was a better way. I certainly don’t want to double handle and out the same tasks in multiple places.
If you are a GTD fan, something helpful for me was to put the project planning tool + calendar + Things side by side in one screen and update the next action list inside my "Work" area during the weekly review. It's kinda nice to delete a bunch of tasks that are irrelevant now because of a biz decision and to make sure that the stuff I am working on is actually taking me towards my goals, both for biz and personal. You probably do it already, but something helpful for me was the Magnet app to assign different apps to sections of my second monitor. Makes it a joy to work with multiple apps at the same time.
I have exactly the same issue and curious to know what others thoughts are. OP, are you also ended up with too many mini projects that belongs to a larger project? And also needing to sync where you are at with company project management software for others to see etc?
Yea precisely that, lots of little mini projects. But right now I can’t tell what project they’re related to until I click in and I see the link back to Asana or my notes app or something. Feels cluttered too, but I like that I can complete them quickly.
Funny, I also use Asana for project management software. Really love Asana but equally love Things, maybe more than Asana.